Voter registration booming in Shelby County

Candidates' popularity prompts thousands to sign up

Samantha Dalton (left) and Angela Cox, both of Munford, dance during a National Education Association voter registration drive at W.C. Handy Park on Sunday.

Chris Desmond/Special to The Commercial Appeal

Shelby County Election Commission administrator James Johnson hasn't seen voter registration numbers like this since Willie Herenton's first run for mayor in 1991.

Some 21,016 voters have registered since February's Tennessee presidential primary and, amazingly, 9,306 voters have registered since July 1, he said Friday.

And that doesn't count the two or three days' worth of mail that has yet to be opened or the roughly 15,000 applications in the queue awaiting processing, Johnson said.

Many of the applications will be simple name or address changes.

Yet with roughly 626,000 active and inactive voters registered, Big Shelby is only growing: Almost half of the applications in recent months have been new voters, Johnson said.

"We've had big numbers before," he said. "We've gotten as many as 50-60,000 applications on the last day," he said, although he doesn't expect that to happen today, which is the last day to register to vote on Nov. 4.

Statewide, too, numbers are trending higher, said state Division of Elections spokesman Brook Thompson. In June, there were 3.3 million active, registered voters, 110,299 more than there had been six months earlier.

Of those new voters, 11,438 were in Shelby County.

Enthusiasm for the presidential race between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama is generating the high interest, even though most polling indicates Obama has no chance of taking Tennessee.

The way the wind's blowing doesn't matter to volunteers like Kerry Hayes, 28, who are excited about the registration drives that have captured thousands of new Democratic voters. Hayes is helping spearhead the voter registration and get-out-the-vote drive for Obama in Shelby County, and he said a conservative estimate is that "we're scraping 10,000" registrations in just the last two months.

That has involved canvassing neighborhoods on weekends and, lately, every afternoon beginning at 4 at the Obama headquarters in the Eastgate shopping center. It has also involved what Hayes calls a lot of "Civics 101" voter education.

"We are looking at the map and trying to target parts of the city that are Obama-friendly and they happen to coincide with areas where voter registrations are not high," said Hayes, who works as a fundraiser for Soulsville. "I work near the intersection of McLemore and Bellevue and that is hugely productive. I could just about have someone out 24/7 and get voters registered."

Hayes said that one of the biggest surprises was the number of volunteers in Memphis actually accelerated more after the Republican National Convention than the Democratic Convention -- with lots of women energized in reaction to John McCain's decision to put Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on his ticket as the vice-presidential nominee.

Part of the voter registration effort is a "viral" one that Shelby County Democratic Party chairman Keith Norman dreamed up as he talked to fellow delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in late August. Norman, pastor of First Baptist Church on Broad, said he sent out letters to a thousand churches when he returned home asking them to name a point person and get their congregations registered.

At his church alone, he estimated he's registered 1,200 voters.

"And it's ongoing," he said.

Republican National Committeeman and Memphis lawyer John Ryder, who attended the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., last month, said both new registrations and re-registrations have been running high.

"There's been a concerted effort throughout the summer to get people signed up and it seems to be paying off," Ryder said.

Ryder said before the national convention, Republicans had very little interest in the race but since then, "you can't keep them away."

Middle Tennessee State University political science professor and honors college dean John R. Vile said he expects Tennessee's 11 electoral votes will go to McCain, but said areas around college campuses are likely to see a lot of enthusiasm for Obama.

The youth vote, he said, "is sort of the Loch Ness monster of American politics -- every year people say they see the sighting and the numbers are going to be big," he said. The youth vote was big in 2004, he noted, but so was almost every other age group.

Other factors besides the huge interest in the presidential race are motivating people to get registered. Tarrin McGhee, community voting project manager for Change Memphis, said her group has accumulated 1,400 registrations. Change Memphis is a coalition of organizations focusing on the proposed amendments to the Memphis City Charter.

McGhee said the biggest misconception has involved those with felony convictions on their record, unsure of what they need to do to restore voting rights.

Van Turner, a Memphis City Schools lawyer helping the Memphis NAACP chapter with this issue, said the process is simpler than most perceive.

Essentially, as long as the conviction did not involve murder, rape, vote fraud or treason, a felon can have voting rights restored, provided he or she has served all time, is not on probation and has paid all fines.

"We are overwhelmed," Turner said. "The response has been really good. We are just trying to get the people together to process them and hopefully get as many of these persons' rights back before this Oct. 6 deadline."

Active voters

Historically, the number of registered voters in Shelby County and in Tennessee has fluctuated as voters move to other states, move into Tennessee, or are purged after not voting in two federal elections. Below is the number of active registered voters in recent months and one month after the last two presidential elections.

June 2008

Shelby County: 533,112

Tennessee: 3,397,103

December 2007

Shelby County: 521,674

Tennessee: 3,287,103

December 2004

Shelby County: 538,827

Tennessee: 3,107,005

December 2000

Shelby County: 579,166

Tennessee: 3,400,487

Source: Tennessee Secretary of State, Division of Elections

Early voting to begin

Early voting for the Nov. 4 General Election begins Oct. 15 and runs weekdays and Saturdays through Oct. 30.

The last day to register to vote is today.

Registering to vote and early voting can be done at the Shelby County Election Commission office at 157 Poplar Ave.

Eighteen satellite voting centers are located at churches and community centers throughout Shelby County. For a list of locations, call (901) 545-4125, then press 4, or go to: shelbyvote.com